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Programming Leftovers
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HowTo Geek ☛ Please stop treating coding tutorials as the best way to learn programming
Are you stuck in the coding tutorial loop? I used to be, but I realized that tutorials were actually holding me back when it came to my programming. Here’s how I realized coding tutorials were setting me up for failure, and how I fixed it.
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ no strcpy either
To make sure that the size checks cannot be separated from the copy itself we introduced a string copy replacement function the other day that takes the target buffer, target size, source buffer and source string length as arguments and only if the copy can be made and the null terminator also fits there, the operation is done.
This made it possible to implement the replacement using memcpy(). Now we can completely ban the use of strcpy in curl source code, like we already did strncpy.
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Dark Reading ☛ SBOMs in 2026: Some Love, Some Hate, Much Ambivalence
A software bill of materials (SBOMs) has been touted as a critical tool in solving software supply-chain security issues, but the rapid change of software ecosystems and the complexity of creating an end-to-end verified chain of code continue to foil widespread adoption.
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Jim Nielsen ☛ To Make Software Is To Translate Human Intent Into Computational Precision
The work is the translation, from thought to tangible artifact. Like making a movie: everyone can imagine one, but it takes a director to produce one.
This is also the work of software development: translation. You take an idea — which is often communicated via natural language — and you translate it into functioning software. That is the work.
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Bertrand Meyer ☛ Criteria and recipes for good technical definitions
Work in engineering, science or technology can only be effective if it relies on precisely defined concepts. For the fundamental notions taught at school, particularly in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, the definitions, honed over centuries, have become impeccable: integral, matrix, speed, mass, molecule… In engineering, definitions are often less satisfactory, sometimes giving the impression of following from a committee process where every member argued for the inclusion of his own pet idea, at the expense of the consistency of the result.
If you ask around you will receive general advice stating that a definition should be clear, precise, unambiguous, complete… All good, but too general.
A definition could satisfy several of these properties and still be flawed. In this article I will use examples – more precisely, counter-examples – from prestigious sources, analyze how they fail to achieve its goals, and draw some lessons for writing good definitions.
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Farid Zakaria ☛ Huge binaries | Farid Zakaria’s Blog
Well let’s take a look at how position independent code is put-together.
Let’s look at a simple example.
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Perl / Raku
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Rakulang ☛ 2025.52 Release #188 & State of the Onion
Many thanks to all authors for the wonderful posts in this year’s Raku Advent. I hope that you enjoyed reading them as much as I did. Particular thanks to Elizabeth Mattijsen for her Raku 2025 Review, which I refer to as State of the Onion 2025 in homage to the Larry Wall annual reports of old.
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